


Showers and Thin Sunshine

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Post-Sburb, Shower Sex, Trolls dealing with being on Earth, Trolls on Earth
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-21 13:46:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/900989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's strange and cold and bright in the aftermath of the game. In some ways you want to feel like nothing ever changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Showers and Thin Sunshine

You’re not sure what to call it. Some call it AlterniEarth, but it’s easy to see that it’s far more Earth than Alternia. Most of the humans seem to be under the impression that that’s the better outcome for any of you. You can’t think of anything to say to that, in the end. It always hangs off the end of the conversation, limp and raw, but you can’t think of a way to verbalise it.

You live with Vriska in a human hiveblock space. Thin, watery sunshine spills through the windows, not really enough to hurt you, although it’s uncomfortable to look at it for too long. It’s not a wretched place to still have your eyesight back, maybe, though you figure that any chance to lose it as you might have wanted has passed. Everything is too synthetic, too – there’s no familiar squelch, at all. If it’s not synthetic, then it’s definitely inorganic. Even the food has an unreal quality to it, as if humans don’t really like to know what they’re eating. An old, old train of thought tells you they aren’t diligent enough. A newer train of thought tells you that the fact is that nothing is cut and dry about humans.

Vriska lays on the sofa, a cushion over her face. It feels like you’ve moved through consciences and consciences with her and without her, and this one is stark and open-ended. It feels odd to be with her, again, and odder still that you were ever away from her. You’re used to not being able to sleep in slime anymore, but you’re surprised that Vriska is taking it as well as she is. She’s still, her chest rising and falling, a soft snore muffled against the cushion. She’s wearing yesterday’s clothes except her venom sacs are unsupported, falling to the sides under her shirt. That’s comfortable when sleeping, you know, but she’ll go without for days on end. You think she really should wear a harness for her own comfort, but you also think that she doesn’t, in part, to annoy you.

You have a job and you dress for it. You spent too long feeling like you can’t do anything, you have to do something. You work for Jade Harley, because she knew you might want the work. She offered the same to Vriska, too.

“Ha, no thanks,” Vriska had said. “I’m pretty sure I can find something better than shoving files around in draws.”

The look that Jade had given her was simultaneously strained and spirited. You don’t think she ever managed to get the dark out of her head (and an insight like that is a strange comfort to you). “That’s fine. I would be giving you lots of duties, though. I never thought about this when I was a kid, but my Grandpa had a lot of stuff that needs sorting. He owned an entire company, after all.” She pauses and gnaws on her lower lip for a second – her teeth would still not look out of place on a troll, you notice. “I just thought you might like something to keep you occupied. It would give you some independence, too. I know you can do a lot more than that, and I’m pretty sure the same goes for Terezi – but this is something until you get settled and maybe find something better.”

Vriska turned away and sat down, heavily, on the sofa. “There’s always something better, Harley.”

Something like spite boiled inside you and you had taken Jade up on her offer there and then, curtly and with a laboriously deliberate thank you. You felt Vriska staring at you, then, and an old, familiar triumph welled up inside you.

“Maybe you can settle, now,” she said, after Jade had left. “But I can do better. I will do better. I’m the lucky one, remember?”

 

And so it came to be that you step outside for seven hours during the evening, your horns concealed underneath the spacious hood of your overcoat while Vriska sits and waits for her luck to build. You don’t think she leaves the house, and you guess it’s easier that way, but there’s something disappointing in the way that she never tries.

The table and the sofa are in disarray – dislodged cushions and empty packets of whatever she could find in the kitchen. Her glasses sit on top of an open newspaper, one arm unclosed. You grab the cushion and throw it at her feet. Her face twitches and she snarls, silently, one of her fangs pressing against her bottom lip, but she doesn’t wake up. Her head is tilted back – her horns digging into the soft material of the couch, her throat exposed. You remember metallic blood and bitter vegetation under bright moons and you want to run one of your claws lightly down the length of her neck.

 

Outlined by the quiet noise of early morning traffic, against the grey of your apartment, it seems pointless and out of place. Human life pulses slow and lethargic around you and you gently grab one of her horns, instead. You pull, not enough to hurt, just enough to wake her and to dislodge the prongs of her right horn from the plush of the couch.

 

She blinks herself awake in the weak morning light. She’s groggy and unsharp and you remember rising from your recuperacoon, snapping straight into the night.

“What?” she demands, her voice rough. “Terezi, it’s the morning.”

“We’re going to sleep in the bedroom. It’s darker and more comfortable. Come on.”

She sits up and her left horn is almost completely hidden in the beesnest of her hair. You wonder when she last brushed her hair. You also wonder when the last time she showered was. Since _he_ left you to drink gallons of disgusting sugar water, you’ve managed to become used to having a regular sense of smell. And you don’t need super senses to know that Vriska needs a shower.

“When was the last time you washed?” you say. You grab the front of her shirt and pull her up. She snaps at your arm, but it’s futile, because you’re making sure to hold her at arm’s length.

There is a moment and then she goes slack. “I don’t know…” she mutters through the curtain of her hair. “I’ve been concentrating on other stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Stufff…just fucking stuff. I don’t have to tell you everything. You’re my kismesis, not my moirail.”

You let go of her shirt and she steadies herself quickly, and stares at you, her eyes narrowed. She looks like a cornered squeakbeast and it would be funny if you didn’t find it so sad. You never really knew where to put her, you were never quite black and you were never quite pale – what you had never really fit anywhere. Or, perhaps, you fit everywhere. You didn’t like that concept back then, but you don’t mind admitting it, now.

“I hope you don’t go anywhere smelling like that,” you say. She smiles, slowly exposing her teeth. They’re stained yellow with coffee, but you feel something boil inside you. You hold onto it.

Vriska peels off her shirt and throws it, with a flourish, back towards you. It misses and lands on the sofa. She heads towards the ablution block – bathroom – and you let the haze rise as you follow her. You don’t peel off your clothes until you shut the door behind you. Your actions are laborious and meticulous and she watches you with a definite impatience.

You remember, once, leaning against the rough bark of a tree, her hand slipping under the hem of your shirt for the first time, as she nipped at your lips, your jaw and your neck – _not_ for the first time and definitely enough to draw blood. There was, figuratively speaking, fresh blood on her hands, then. And on yours, but you told yourself, then, that you had your own reasons, your own agenda.

You fold up your pants and then she pulls you, claws sharp points against your wrist, into the shower. The water runs too hot to begin with, but she has you pressed against the glass of the shower, her teeth catching at the skin of your shoulder, so you don’t notice as much.

You cup one of her breasts and, with your other hand, you let your claws run down her back. They tangle in her dampening hair and you increase the pressure enough to feel blood as you run towards the angle of her hip. She’s all points and angles, still. You feel her bulge entwine with yours and then you sigh and you growl into her razor sharp smile again.

Afterwards, you walk back through to the living room, naked and drying from the shower. There are scores on your flanks and bite marks on your shoulders and breasts. In this moment, you think, wryly, you’ve never held anything against anybody. Vriska stalks into the kitchen, having lit a cigarette. You watch her as the acrid smoke spirals back into the living room, reaching your nose. You can vaguely wonder, now, what something might have smelled like when you could smell colors. You don’t wonder so much, here. You watch the smoke circle, anyway, though, and you watch Vriska as she leans against the counter. Your apartment is open wide, so it’s possible to see the kitchen from the living room.

“You are so disgusting,” you say. She shrugs and you stay in the moment. She is both less and more than your black quadrant but you find it’s so comfortable to put her there. It’s a familiar square – you know where the edges are.

You regard each other for a moment, and you notice where you bit her just beneath her collarbone, her skin flushing blue. It’s still a victory so you dwell on that.

“You’ve had worse,” she says, and she gives a rasping cackle. It cuts through your moment, breaks at those caliginous walls you know. You leave to go to sleep, then, and you just slide naked under the covers of your human bed. You’re asleep by the time Vriska joins you.

She’s pressed firmly against you when you wake up and you’ve never thought of her as being in any way fragile, before. You leave her there and wander back into the living room. You switch the television on and let it burble away in the background. You pull a half-eaten cluckbird from the fridge and pick at the bones as you half listen to the human news.

Human justice is tangled up, you realised a while ago. You can understand sometimes, but other times you don’t even bother. You will work it out, you think.

You spend the night in Jade’s office, organising, this evening, factory ownership clauses and documents. Jade bustles around you, busily, like she doesn’t want to stop. You read the documents of ownership, of the confectionary company Jade’s grandfather had owned before he had come to own it, and a quiet, dawning recognition pushes at your think-pan. You don’t bother saying anything, though. It feels better to keep that one to yourself.

 

When you get home, Vriska is squinting out of the window.

“Jeez, you’d think with their short lives they’d be more interesting,” she says. Her body goes rigid for a moment, as she concentrates, and then she relaxes. You, in turn, feel yourself become tense. “Most of them have less than fifty sweeps and they don’t do shit. Oh, but I made that one fall asleep, still, right on the sidewalk.”

Clarity hits you, all of a sudden, and you steer her away from the window and back into the bedroom. She moves briskly ahead of you and what starts as a reprimand ends up with you clasping her hands over head, her bulge writhing in the palm of your hand. She laughs and tells you that she knows what to do, now. She’s here to make things more interesting, she says. Your own bulge twitches, swollen inside her nook and she wriggles down onto you and giggles, high and breathy.

“That’s pretty much all there is to do, here, Terezi,” she says, simply, later on.

You sigh. “That’s because you won’t change,” you say, and your tone is simpler than hers.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the HSWC. I wanted to try a post-s***b scenario, too, and the prompt for these two jump-started that. I'm tentatively putting this at 2 chapters because I had planned to add some more to it.
> 
> Prompt was the songs 'Crazy for You -- Best Coast', 'No Offense -- SLUTEVER' and 'Combat Baby -- Metric'.


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